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but meant nothing to IT. He couldn't separate the language into words. Here
and there, a word in the griffin speech sounded like the CW
name for a system: "Farkash," for "Barkus," and so on. The difference was due
to the griffin facial physiognomy. Keff wondered what had happened to the
human computer operator who had told them how to use the system and pronounced
some of the names for them.
In the live transmissions from the planet, Keff saw the creatures speaking in
colloquial dialect. After several hours of listening to tape after tape, he
was delighted to begin to discern patterns. Each of the messages began with
the same word or words of greeting: "Freihur." Keff had his "hello."
"This is my Rosetta stone," he told Tall Eyebrow, with a flourish. 'This is
the way we can begin to understand the language."
The Frog Princes eyes shone. He and Big Eyes sat with Keff while he was trying
to make some sense out of the griffin tapes during that first day. They
imitated the phrases they heard, only two or three octaves higher, flutes
playing alongside trombones and trumpets. Keff thought they had reasonably
good ears, but it was only music to them. They still lacked any concept of
meaning. The Cridi were better at concrete, spatial concepts, rather than
abstract, but they retained perfectly what he told them. IT began to pick out
sentence patterns, even separating word roots where they were repeated in
different combinations. Carialle now had thousands of "telephone
conversations" from which Keff could work. He was steadily gleaning
vocabulary, where the caller occasionally showed an object to his or her
callee. None of it was much help; he doubted he'd have occasion to refer to
plants, babies, mixing bowls, or necklaces in a diplomatic conversation, but
the use of noun and pronoun patterns was useful. Some of the extra memory that
the CW had thoughtfully provided Carialle for the diplomatic mission was
coming in very handy. They'd have to see what they could
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keeping it when they returned to base.
Keff stayed at the console, still working on the language question when the
Cridi went off for baths and bed. He half-listened to the excited chirps of
conversation coming from the spare cabin as the frogs discussed the days
discovery. Soon, the noise died away, and he glimpsed the light go out just
before the cabin door slid shut.
He was concerned about what he would find when they made orbit, or landed on
the griffin homeworld. Would they have to run for their lives? Were they
blundering blindly into a trap? And how would the Cridi react? It would be the
end of his and
Carialle's careers if they deliberately put the elements together for an
interstellar conflict.
And he was concerned about Carialle's state of mind. Their duties as hosts and
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teachers had taken up much of the personal time they usually spent together.
For the first time in years he couldn't guess what she was thinking.
Her determination to pursue the hunt had led her to concentrate most of her
attention on it. Her theory that the griffin ship was transiting frequently
between the Cridi system and the one next door was borne out by the discovery
of the wispy threads of many ion trails. They were delicate, hard to see, and
remarkably easy to overshoot.
Carialle did a lot of backtracking when the thin traces broke and .drifted
away where they'd been disturbed by anomalies such as ion storms or comets.
Picking up the aud/
vid broadcasts and confirming that they were heading for the griffin
stronghold should have made her relax, but she seemed more concentrated than
ever. Multiplexing astrogation, running the ship, playing M&L with the Cridi,
maintaining lines of communication and acting as data librarian pulled her
attention in a dozen directions at once. Keff worried that in the midst of it
all she was thinking too hard about what lay ahead. What if this turned out to
be another dry hole in her search for the beings that once threatened her life
and sanity? Where would they go next? The team was risking censure and worse
by CenCom, and Maxwell-Corey in particular, by ignoring their orders, and yet
they couldn't stay off-line forever. Sooner or later they had to communicate,
no matter what that brought in return. True, circumstances had changed a
routine mission into an emergency, but would the IG see it that way? M-C
already doubted the soundness of Carialle's emotions, enough to jeopardize his
own position by rigging her with a telltale missile.
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JODY LYNN NYE - [The Ship Who Sang Series - 06] The Ship Errant
Keff felt his face grow hot, and realized he was still just as mad about M-C's
impossible gall as he had been when the message probe had launched. He stood
up from the console, commanding IT to save his last hour's progress. Then, he
plunked himself down on his exercise bench and started pulling on the weight
bars until he began to breathe in rhythm. Soon, the resentment was driven out
by the simple beat of the weights clapping together. The tension melted away,
replaced by the honest warmth of a good workout. Eyes closed, he smiled at the
ceiling.
"Penny for them," Carialle's voice said.
He opened his eyes, but continued to haul on the pulleys. "I was just thinking
we haven't talked in a long time. Just the two of us."
"I've been missing that, too," she said, regretfully. "It takes a lot out of a
girl, playing hostess nonstop."
"Same here," Keff said, giving one last massive flex of his shoulders that
took all the tension out of the part of his back between the scapulae, and let
the weights down gently. "Just now I'm tempted to agree with the IGs
assessment that we're nuts."
"Still doubt we're doing the right thing?"
"I wonder," Keff said. He stood up and reached for a towel slung over the back
of the
Rotoflex. "These people trust us enough to accompany them into the great
unknown on their very first spaceflight, with their very first working ship
after being grounded for fifty years. So many things could go wrong!"
"But they haven't, Sir Keff," Carialle said, manifesting her Lady Fair image
on the wall. It was outlined in white. Keff smiled at her, feeling as if he
was meeting an old and beloved friend again after a long, lonely separation.
It occurred to him, with characteristic wry humor that it had been a long time
since he'd seen a flesh-and-blood woman, either. Time enough for that at
mission's end. "Don't over anticipate, my dear friend. I'm not, I promise you.
Don't worry about specifics. Just keep on your toes."
"Stand and deliver!" a man's baritone voice barked from beside him. Keff
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jumped to one side, putting the weight bench between himself and the rude
looking villain in a tunic standing in a torchlit doorway. The /man was
leveling a fearsome sword at his throat. Keff grinned ferociously and edged
toward his laser epee, slung handily across the back of one of the crash
couches. He realized Carialle had created the aural effect by activating only
his left ear implant. The villain paced him with his swordpoint, his
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JODY LYNN NYE - [The Ship Who Sang Series - 06] The Ship Errant black brows
lowered over narrow eyes.
"Clever, lady," Keff said. With a quick lift and slide, he unsheathed his
sword, and assumed the en garde position.
"Put 'em up," she said, in the enemy's deep voice. "We both need a good game,
just you and me."
"Right," Keff said, tipping the glowing red point of his blade toward the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]